Germany's forest fires come with an explosive twist: WWII munitions | Hacker News Reader

Germany's forest fires come with an explosive twist: WWII munitions

fortune.com

69 pointsMilnerRoute51 comments

Earlier this week, in Sweden:

”a […] forest fire is located in an old firing range littered with unexploded military ordnance, making it hazardous even if fire crews could reach the area.“

So, they

”launched a flight of Gripen fighter bombers loaded with GBU-49 laser guided bombs. The Gripens dropped one bomb at an altitude of 9,800 feet. The bomb exploded on target, extinguishing flames up to 100 yards from the impact point”

I am not sure bombing fires is cost effective or applicable in most cases.

It was a last resort action.

But I wonder why oxygen extracting bomb are not used more often.

Firefighters here (Netherlands) sometimes use them in old wooden houses. They are like grenates that extract all oxygen so the fire dies.

That is strangely reminiscent of Larry Niven's "The Magic Goes Away."

http://elidefire.com/products.htm?

That seems like a much better idea, but I don't know anything about oxygen extraction.

Like some type of Halon grenade?

It might just work in Sweden, which has a low population density, but the fires around Potsdam are in the Berlin vicinity - people would probably frown at bombings, even if the bombs used are laser-guided precision ordnance.

I’d want a thorough analysis of the probablility of failure, certainly. A 90% on-target rate would be just fine for a weapon of war but is probably bad for a firefighting tool.

Cost might be an issue... let alone the issue of leaving your own ordinance that fails to detonate.. .

We have nukes in California. Nuking fires might be worth a try.

That sounds a little like a stunt or limited to very specific circumstances.

It does, but actually oil well fires have been put out with explosives.

During the first USA-Iraq war Saddam Hussein's troops lit up several hundred oil wells as they withdrew from Kuwait. Some of these were extinguished with the help of explosives. The situation is not fully analogous though, since in the case of Sweden it was too dangerous to get even remotely close to the source of fire.

fight fire with fire

In Germany every year about 5500 WWII bombs are defused. According to a 2013 estimate there are about 100.000 left [1].

My personal experience - living in Munich, Germany - is that approx. one or two times per year I am late because of traffic problems caused by bomb disposal activities.

Another source of explosives in the forests here are blanks that were left by NATO troops during maneuvers.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindg%C3%A4nger

I had never experienced that in my first 32 years or so. But when I moved where I’m now living, within 5 years I had experienced three bomb defusings with mass evacuations (I’ve always been just outside the evacuation zone). No surprise, it was a strategically important place, so the Allies bombed a lot.

It‘s a bit of a local media spectacle, with the local newspaper running stories welcoming back the defusing team by name.

Now imagine what the people in Laos, Vietnam or Cambodia have to put up with. During the Vietnam war more bombs were dropped there than during whole World War 2.

Or the Zone Eouge in France. The pictures here are particularly sobering:

http://www.messynessychic.com/2015/05/26/the-real-no-go-zone...

I've heard different estimates from it will take 300 years to clear the UXO from the Zone Route to it will never be truly free of UXO.

Yeah its amazing how all over Europe after 70 years they still regularly find bombs.

The Wehrmacht also laid millions of mines but thanks to German obsession with administration those were all removed in a few years (with the "assistance" of German POWs)

> Yeah its amazing how all over Europe after 70 years they still regularly find bombs.

Note in various places it's WW1 munitions as well (and some of those being chemical and biological weapons).

There was just so much used in both wars that it's practically inevitable, because much is now below the surface and exposed through ploughing.

An interesting movie which has the removal of the mines as topic is "Land of mine" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3841424/

Yup, to this day there are quite a few forested areas with warning signs [0] telling people not to leave the paved roads. It's still a very real danger: Back in 2010 an old 1000 lb US WWI bomb, with a long time fuze, exploded one hour before the planed defusion near Göttingen, which already lead to the evacuation of 7000 people, killing three people, injuring another six [1]

Just 2 months ago another defusion, in Dresden, also partly went wrong but luckily nobody was injured [2]

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennenloher_Forst#/media/File:...

[1] http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/routine-disposal...

[2] https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bombe-in-dresden-bei-entschaer...

> Another source of explosives in the forests here are blanks that were left by NATO troops during maneuvers.

Blanks? As in blank small-arms ammunition and artillery rounds? I've never heard of them being a fire-risk before, or being dumped like that. They don't contain much explosive do they? How is this happening?

I don't know if they are really a risk but I know that there are a lot of them because I collected them as a child and they were not really hard to find after a maneuver, when they were sill shiny.

> Firefighters there have found their work hampered by explosions from munitions dating back to World War II, which were buried and had been undisturbed until the heat of the flames set them off.

My point was more that the explosions (blanks are loud) could have been caused by ammunition dropped long after WWII.

I can't help but think you're talking about expended brass, not blanks. One is functionally metallic debris, while the other is a small lump of explosives and a detonator inside a metal shell. Militaries tend to be much more stringent around policing the latter than the former.

> Militaries tend to be much more stringent around policing the latter than the former.

Not on large exercise ranges like those common in Germany. Do you really think every single soldier collects every blank he ejected, that didn't initially fire/jammed, during the maneuver?

No, these are simply left behind, in all sizes and calibers, and for all purpose and effect are still "small lumps of explosives with detonator", just with some kind of malfunction preventing the regular way of triggering the donation, but they are still very capable of detonating.

My experience is from the late 80s and early 90s. Maybe it is really more stringent today.

We found the ammo not at designated exercise ranges like those around Grafenwöhr or Hohenfels but ordinary forests, fields and meadows where we children used to play.

We often found small batches and the ones I had in my hands were new and without scratches. My theory is that they were thrown away after the mission because the guys were too lazy to carry them back to the camp, but I don't know for sure.

The expended ones are open at the tip to various degrees and can be found as well. I'm talking about the cleanly crimped close ones, the new and shiny ones. We collected them not only because of their shininess and there is a reason I now how loud blanks are;-)

There is a company renting out firefighting tanks to fire brigades. Really: https://www.inforadio.de/programm/schema/sendungen/int/20180...

I am still baffled that back then people could not build mechanisms to set a bomb off reliably, yet could build bombs that remained deadly while lying in the ground for what now amounts to a decent human lifetime. And I am deliberately ignoring the legacy of World War I here, which according to the latest forecasts will still take centuries to clean up.

The difficult bit is making a bomb that goes off reliably but not before. Explosive stabilisation is the innovation that made the Nobel fortune, remember.

Then be really worried, the amount of munitions dumped at sea is staggering[1]. A US bomb was found around Fukushima near a car park [2]. People tend to ignore the amount of munitions and equipment scattered all over the Pacific and adjacent nations from Japan's attempt to conquer the area during WW2. Their build up while not as impressive as some of the German construction was just as destructive

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/decaying-weapo... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-40886169

Do countries like Germany, with rich, relatively recent military history have schools where people go to learn all the different models of bomb that they used back in WW2? How do they keep all that important knowledge circulating for defusal techs after all these years?

Quite interesting

I presume they write it down.

In Germany there's special training run at least partially by the same places that do other kinds of explosives training. And some defusal experts had explosives training from the military beforehand.

Related.

There's actually not a lot of primary sources on the reticles used in German armour.

So developers of some of these WWII "realistc" shooters have to design new ones.

I would guess there's better documentation of mines and bombs.

I've actually wondered about that too! My uncle has a bunch of old rifle optics equipment. Very unusual reticles on some of them!

> Thanks to soaring temperatures, the northern hemisphere has recently been struck with an unusual spate of wildfires, from Greece, Sweden, and the U.K. to Canada and United States.

I'm reminded of Peter Watts' Echopraxia :(

> It follows the story of a biologist who gets caught up in a voyage into the heart of the solar system among members of a transcendentalist monastic order and allies (including a vampire escaped from a research facility and her cadre of zombified soldiers) to investigate a mysterious signal seemingly coming from the mission sent to initiate first contact

You're reminded because of the space vampires?

You gotta read the novel to get it. I did search for a quote, but Google didn't have one. I could explain, but that would be a major plot giveaway. Let's just say that GCC-driven wildfires are a major problem then, and that they need lots of energy to pump sulfates into the stratosphere.

Instead of the article I'm prompted with a privacy policy page.

> You always have the choice to experience our sites without personalized advertising based on your web browsing activity by visiting the DAA’s Consumer Choice page, the NAI's website, and/or the EU online choices page,

The latter page, the one relevant to me, is a 404. Is it an ironic adblocker on my phone or is it 404 for everybody?

http://www.youronlinechoices.com/

FWIW, it's not 404 for me, but I don't understand what's the purpose of this page.

I couldn't get past the nag screen. :-/ Fortunately archive.org has a working copy:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180728201531/http://fortune.co...

I was worried about contaminants, but flame retardants are quite bad also.

Edit. I thought this was in regards to a story about using bombs to extinguish forest fires that I heard on the news a day ago.

Should or could defense contractors/weapon manufacturers be held liable for bombs that did not explode when planned and the damages and costs that this occurs later? Frankly I find the idea almost entertaining to bill them the direct (and maybe indirect) costs of for example a nowadays evacuation of a city because a bomb needs to be defused.

While we're at it, we should also make them liable for bombs that did explode as planned.

There's been some work on making munitions, especially mines, self-disarming. So after some period of time they won't blow up.

I think the main thing with preventing future munitions from causing problems like this is simply to avoid wars. So keeping NATO, the EU, the UN, and other organizations functional and influential is important.

(Even so, there'd be some amount of weaponry used within reserved training areas, but at least there the risk is known and civilians aren't in danger.)

IIRC the US is mostly compliant with the treaties (without actually signing them) - there's a man in the loop, mines self disarm, etc.

At least with the newer mines.

Could be wrong though.

Oh, and ... reimburse the buyer of the weapon as well?

Shouldn't they have the option of dropping a working bomb on the location, thus delivering the explosion that their defective bomb failed to deliver?

Sometimes, as with mines, you don't necessarily want them to go off. You only want them to go off if triggered.

They would remain dangerous, however, unless they're the kind that renders itself chemically inert or otherwise incapable of exploding after some period of time has passed, in order to reduce risk of civilian casualties.

only during wartime! during peacetime the unintended victim should be renumerated

Reply on news.ycombinator.com